Visual Genealogies of Mixed-Race Black Koreans: Transnational Representations in American and Korean Cultures

This dissertation traces the cultural history and experience of black Koreans as portrayed in literary, photographic, filmic, televisual, musical, and performative platforms since the US militarization of Korea in 1945. Through selected archival materials, “Visual Genealogies of Mixed-Race Black Koreans” excavates the shifting constructions of race, nationality, and citizenship through images of mixed-race identities in American and Korean visual cultures. I argue that changes in legislation and global politics with regard to race, gender, and citizenship in Korea and the United States have influenced portrayals of black Koreans. My research considers the relationship between race and citizenship as historically, legally, and culturally situated, shifting in conjunction with local and global politics. This is the first comprehensive exploration of black Koreans as represented in underexplored archival materials, and it exposes how American and Korean visual cultures have used gendered and racialized stereotypes to portray mixed-race identities. The mixed-race identities in the American and Korean cultures reveal changing notions of Americanness, blackness, and Koreanness, problematizing racial categories and the boundaries of a single nation in a global age. Based on close reading technique in critical media and cultural studies and my academic training in the United States and South Korea across three disciplines, “Visual Genealogies of Mixed-Race Black Koreans” brings together scholarship in Asian American Studies, Korean Studies, and African American Studies to better understand the influence of transnational politics on local and national conceptions of race and citizenship.PhDAmerican CultureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146097/1/jooylee_1.pdfDescription of jooylee_1.pdf : Restricted to UM users only